The Accidental Wife (45 page)

‘Mum, don’t start defending him,’ Dominic said wearily, sitting down heavily on his bed.

‘I’m not defending him. I’m just asking you to think about what you did, about how bloody stupid you were.’

‘Mr Ashley reckons I hate Dad so much because I love him,’ Dom said, picking up his towel.

Alison thought for a moment. She had been both intrigued and relieved when she found out that the first adult Dom had
gone
to was Jimmy. He’d only known him properly for a few weeks and yet he felt he could turn to him about his father. It was good that there was someone in his life he felt that way about, but it broke her heart that it wasn’t Marc.

‘Maybe he’s right about that,’ she suggested tentatively.

‘I thought Dad was going to bollock me, rip me to shreds when he picked me up but he didn’t say anything, not a word,’ Dom said. ‘It was like I was invisible.’

‘Maybe he doesn’t know what to say,’ Alison said, ‘or how to say it.’

She took a step closer to her son and put her hands on his shoulders, chasing his constantly averting gaze until she finally made eye contact with him.

‘You’re fifteen, Dom,’ she said. ‘I know you feel like you’re invincible but anything could have happened to you out there, anything.’

‘I know,’ Dom said. ‘I didn’t mean to sleep rough all night. It was shit and freezing fucking cold. I was going to ask Mr Ashley if I could stay with him, but his boat wasn’t there.’

‘You could have been mugged, beaten up … murdered, even,’ Alison said, feeling her voice vibrate like a drum. ‘Don’t ever do that again, not ever. I probably should have come home last night, I should have been there for you. But I promise you from now on I always will be, so no matter how angry you feel or how hurt, never
ever
run away from me like that again. Promise me? I couldn’t stand for anything to happen to you.’

‘I won’t do it again,’ Dominic said, dropping his head. ‘I don’t know how you ran away for good when you were seventeen, Mum. It was bloody horrible.’

‘It was bloody horrible for me too,’ Alison said. ‘But I had your dad and he looked after me.’

‘Are you really going to stay with Dad?’ Dom asked.

Alison was silent for a long moment. ‘I need to talk to your
dad
before I talk to anyone else about that, OK? But I’m going to need you a lot over the next few weeks, Dom. I’m going to need you to support me and the girls, OK?’

‘I will,’ he promised her, dipping his head, mumbling a barely audible, ‘Love you, Mum’ into his T-shirt.

‘So what do you want to do now?’ Alison asked him. ‘Do you want to talk about it? Tell me what happened yesterday with you and Dad? What it was like out there all night?’

‘Honestly?’ Dom said, looking back up at her, his eyes filling with tears. ‘I want to cry.’

The girls had eaten Sunday tea, a feast of sausage and beans, around Marc, chattering away to him while he sat with that same flat and warm bottle of beer at the table, nodding and smiling. He wasn’t the same as he usually was when he was with them, revelling in their attention. He was reserved and withdrawn. Alison thought he seemed almost bruised.

Still touched by guilt that she had been absent last night she bathed both the girls together and spent an extra long time reading them each their favourite story, making sure that each one was tucked in their separate rooms, night-lights on and favourite toys tucked under arms. As she brushed Gemma’s hair back from her forehead and kissed the top of her nose, Gemma put her hand on her wrist.

‘Love you, Mummy,’ she said.

‘I love you too, darling,’ Alison replied.

Next she walked along the corridor to Dominic’s room where he was lying in his bed in a T-shirt and jogging bottoms, his iPod plugs in his ears, strumming the tune he was listening to on his guitar. He sat up when he saw Alison was there, pulling the earpieces out.

‘You must be starving,’ Alison said. ‘Why don’t you come down and I’ll make you something. I’ve got sausages.’

‘Is he down there?’ Dominic asked her. Alison thought about her husband sitting at the kitchen table.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He’s been sitting downstairs thinking since you got back. I think he’s waiting to talk to you – and I mean talk, not shout. Come down and eat with us. Please, Dom.’

Dominic hesitated. ‘OK,’ he said eventually, steeling himself to his decision by squaring his shoulders and brushing his hair off his face. ‘I’ll be down in a minute.’

‘Thank you,’ Alison said.

Just as she was leaving Dominic’s room, she noticed Amy’s door being pushed closed again. Wondering if she’d got up to go to the loo, Alison carefully pushed Amy’s door open to check she was OK.

She found that both her daughters were curled up together in the same bed.

‘She can’t sleep without me,’ Gemma explained, sitting up.

‘I can’t, Mama,’ Amy told her. ‘Please can she stay?’

‘Otherwise she won’t sleep and it’s school tomorrow,’ Gemma said. ‘I can sleep fine on my own, but you know what Amy’s like. She’ll only worry. Besides, I don’t mind looking after her, Mummy.’

Alison crossed the room and pulled the cover across both of them, tucking them in.

‘Of course you can stay here,’ she said, kissing both of them again. ‘And, if you like, tomorrow we can move both your beds into one room so you don’t have such a squash and a squeeze.’

‘Thank you, Mummy,’ Gemma and Amy said together.

‘Girls,’ Alison started, ‘I’m sorry that everything is so up and down at the moment. It will settle down one way or another soon, I promise you.’

‘We know, Mummy,’ Amy said on a yawn. ‘We know.’

When Alison got downstairs Dom was already in the
kitchen
hovering around the fridge in his bare feet and jogging bottoms. Marc was still sitting at the table, the two of them ignoring each other as if they were standing in parallel universes where the other one simply did not exist.

‘Right then,’ Alison said, determined to draw their realities together, ‘sausages and beans all round because I can’t be bothered to make anything more demanding than that.’ She glanced at Dom. ‘Sit down.’

Warily Dominic sat down at the table at the furthest possible position from Marc. Marc did not look at him.

‘Do you want another beer?’ Alison asked him, hoping to break his silence. ‘That one’s sat there for hours.’

Marc looked up at her, ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m fine really.’

As Alison set the food down in front of them and also sat down, she prepared herself; even hoped for another silent meal. This strange shuttered version of her husband sitting just to her right was better at least than the shouting and threatening one that had emerged recently. It seemed to Alison that both Marc and Dom appeared surprised by what last night had turned into for both of them. And perhaps that was a good thing. Perhaps silent reflection was exactly what they needed.

But Alison had not finished chewing her first mouthful when Marc spoke.

‘Dom,’ he said, looking at his son at last and making the boy start. ‘I shouldn’t have shouted at you the way I did last night. And I shouldn’t have threatened you like I did on Friday. I’m sorry.’

Dom stared at his plate, holding his knife and fork in each hand as if he were afraid to move.

‘I haven’t got an excuse or even a good reason really,’ Marc continued. ‘I never had a dad. I never knew who he was or what he was like, don’t have a single memory of him. Not even
a
photo. I hardly knew my mum either, to be honest. She was out of my life by the time I was three. I know that you know all of this, I know I’ve told you a hundred times how I pulled myself up by my boot strings and created myself from nothing. But that’s not the truth, is it? I didn’t come out of nothing. Probably somewhere out there still are the man and the woman that made me. And I suppose I might take after them, I don’t know. Like I don’t know sometimes how to be a dad, especially now. Especially now that you are becoming a young man yourself. It was easier when you were little, when you thought I was the best thing since sliced bread. But now you know that I’m not perfect. You’ve judged me and I failed you, Dom, and I’m sorry but I love you, son, and somehow I’m going to put this right between us. I think I’m going to need your help, though.’

Alison found that she was holding her breath as Dominic looked across the table at Marc. ‘And what about what you’ve done to Mum?’ Dominic asked him. ‘Are you sorry about that too?’

‘Dom, your dad’s said sorry –’ Alison began, trying to head off another confrontation before it ignited.

‘No, it’s OK,’ Marc said, holding his hand up to stop her. ‘It’s a fair question. And the answer is that of course I’m sorry. I’m always sorry. The truth is I’ve always wanted to be better than I am, and until now I’ve always failed. I’m a far from perfect husband, a far from perfect father, a far from perfect man. But I am so proud of you and the decent, caring, principled boy you’ve become, despite me. I think I need to try and live up to your standards.’

‘Are you going to tell us that you’ll try and change?’ Dominic asked him, a hint of sarcastic serration in his tone.

‘No, I’m not saying I’m going to change,’ Marc said. ‘I’ve said that too many times and it hasn’t worked. I’m saying I’m
going
to do what I
know
that I can, which is to be a good father to you and your sisters, and I want you to remember that I will always be around for you, no matter what happens between me and Mum. I want you to remember that because I’m going to move out. Find a place of my own. You can all stay here if you want, or sell it and buy somewhere new. It’s up to you. But I want you all to understand that I’m not moving out because I don’t love you. I’m moving out because I do. I wanted to tell you two first. I’ll explain it to the girls in the morning. I hope you will both be there to help me with that.’

As Marc spoke Alison felt ice-cold panic grip her heart and squeeze it, and a sense of dizzying unreality, as if she were watching this next turn her life was taking playing out before her on a movie screen.

This was it: the moment she had seen coming for months, possibly years, and yet had never quite believed would arrive, and he had chosen to make it happen, he had found the courage. He was really going. After all of this time he was going to leave her to stand alone in the world, and even if this had been the very thing she knew had to happen, hearing him say it shocked and terrified her.

‘Are you leaving for ever?’ Dominic asked him stiffly, two red blotches standing out on his otherwise pallid cheeks.

Marc looked at Alison and picked up her hand. ‘I think so,’ he said.

Alison returned his gaze and for the first time in a long while she felt close to him.

With a single nod Dominic stood up and held out his hand.

‘I’m sorry about yesterday too, Dad,’ he said. ‘I behaved like a kid.’

As Marc let go of Alison’s hand in order to stand up and shake his son’s, Dom added, ‘And for what it’s worth, when I
was
a little kid and thought you were the best dad in the world that wasn’t because I was little and didn’t know any better. It was because you
were
the best dad in the world. And … I’m glad you’re my dad because I think you will still be a great dad. I think you and me will be OK.’

Dominic looked at Alison, nipping at his lip.

‘I might go up now,’ he said. Alison, still unable to speak, nodded.

Dominic picked up his still-full plate. ‘I might take this with me,’ he added apologetically.

Alison was surprised to hear herself laugh. ‘Go on then,’ she told him. ‘Just this once.’

When Dom had gone Alison got up from the table and found an opened bottle of wine in the fridge. Her hand shook as she poured herself and then Marc a glass.

‘I don’t know about you,’ she said, setting the drink down in front of him, ‘but I could do with a drink.’ Marc mustered a smile for her and held the wine glass by its stem.

‘I don’t know what to say, Marc,’ Alison said eventually. ‘Or how to act. I don’t think that what you’ve just told me has sunk in yet. I can’t believe this is happening now, that after more than fifteen years we’re splitting up.’

‘Pretty good going, I’d say,’ Marc said. ‘Considering we’d only known each other five minutes when we got together. Considering that, I’d say fifteen years and three kids is pretty good going.’

‘We’ve grown up together,’ Alison said. ‘I’ve always had you, always relied on you. Even when you weren’t very reliable I could always rely on you. I’m thirty-two and I’ve never had a job, never had to pay my own bills. God, I’m a spoiled bitch.’

‘I’ll still be around,’ Marc said. ‘I’m not leaving the town. I’ll still be building the business. I’ll see the kids as much as I
can
and you too, if you’ll let me. You don’t have to get a job if you don’t want to, or even pay your bills. I can still take care of all that.’

‘No.’ Alison smiled but shook her head. ‘It’s about time I learned how to be independent. You should keep contributing towards the children but not to me.’ She laughed and took another sip of wine. ‘I can’t believe that we’re sitting here talking about the end of our marriage like this. Where are the tears and the screaming?’

‘I think there’s been enough of that recently, don’t you?’ Marc said.

Alison nodded and the two were silent for a minute longer.

‘This is going to be hard on the girls,’ Alison said.

‘Yes,’ Marc said. ‘It will be.’

‘Do you think,’ Alison felt panic surge through her like a current again, ‘that we should just keep things as they are after all? Just until the girls are older, maybe until they’re at uni …? I mean, we rub along OK, don’t we, you and me? We understand each other now, and I’m … I’m frightened.’

Marc shook his head and covered her hand with his own. ‘Jimmy Ashley told me today that you can only ever ask somebody to forgive you once, because once is the only time they might actually do it and mean it. But if you ask them a second or a third or a fourth time, no matter what they say they can’t ever really wipe the slate clean again because they know now that you won’t change. You know I won’t be the sort of husband you deserve, and now I think I know it. I love you but I’m tired of hurting you and if I stay I know that sooner or later that will happen again. I don’t want to do that any more.’